Reviews

Emma Swift
Album: The Resurrection Game
Label: Tiny Ghost
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.emmaswift.com

In 2020, Australian singer-songwriter Swift was basking in a flood of critical acclaim for her Dylan reinterpretations album Blonde On The Tracks. However, that was followed not long after by a seven-week nervous breakdown that saw her sectioned and over a year of recovery. Aptly titled, written between 2022 and 2024, this album, her first of original material, marks her re-emergence, transforming personal struggle into music that speaks of the challenges faced and the support systems and inner strength that pulled her through. It is at times heavy going, Swift describing it as a bummer of a record, but the emotion within it, and the arrangements and string quartet orchestrations that frame it, are anything but despairing or downbeat as she faces her sadness and pain head on. Backed by a core band of seasoned Nashville sideman, Spencer Cullum on pedal steel, keyboardist Jordan Lehningm drummer Dominic Billet and Juan Solorzano on guitar, it opens with the languid early hours, strings-washed haze of 'Nothing And Forever' with its images of limbo and transience ("Somewhere between/Nothing and forever/That's you and me…love goes on/Then one day it goes").

If that's about some inevitable loss, the first of four clocking in over five minutes, written after attending an experiential therapy retreat in Northern California called the Hoffman Process where participants work to identify and be rid of negative behaviours and ways of thinking developed unconsciously in childhood, the breathily sung title track with its rolling drums and sweeping string and keys suggests the reclamation of something that might have been dead ("In Calistoga, where the redwoods grow/I have come to, to excavate your bones") as, rain a metaphor for rebirth, she sings "I'm getting close to you again" but then it ends, rain now washing things way, with a resignation of "With ash in my hair/And dirt in my nails/The eternal story/We love and we fail/Breathing in fire and calling it air/I've come to surrender/To what was never there".

The keys tinkling, the title of the dreamy slow waltz 'No Happy Endings' would seem to encapsulate a downbeat overarching theme, but turns out to be more optimistic than it appears, a potential resurrection in itself, as she sings "I've come up for air/After years underground/Still got the taste/Of dirt in my mouth…I've come back for the spring/And I've come back for you…But everything, everything changes/Maybe you have too…You've been wearing a watch/Since we last slept together/It chimes on the hour/This isn't forever/Still desperate times/Call for desperate pleasures/And I've never done anything/In half measure…There are no happy endings/But baby I'm trying". It just needs the effort to make a connection ("Switch off our phones/And not watch the news/Let's look up from our devices/Long enough to hang a wish/Upon the moon".

As slow as a funeral march and stripped to basics with echoing tremolo guitar and ponderous drums punctuating the spaces, , 'Going Where The Lonely Go' again trades in paradoxical images of physical and existential desire and damnation ("bring your lovely self near/Together we disappear…Is that a serpent's hiss?/Your kiss tastes like the abyss/You're a certified alchemist/I'm learning all I have missed/How could I resist?...Tell me we're without sin/I don't want the mess we're in/Just your skin on my skin/Doesn't it feel like the one time/These atoms were meant to collide/And I'll love you til the world dies").

Again with string quartet orchestration alongside pedal steel, glockenspiel and horns, her voice rising and falling, there's a dreamy ethereality to the equally slow and measured 'Beautiful Ruins' with its emotionally raw, trauma-steeped gothic imagery ("I come from ... the place of many crows/And I've told them all my stories/And I've let them pick my bones/And they love you they love you/And then they leave you alone…I come from the place, of shimmering, shimmering heat/Of volcanic tempers and tumbleweeds/And all roads lead to where the black birds feed/On your/Beautiful ruins…I burned my feet on the pavement/Burned my tongue on the sky/And the questions I have about you and I/Lead to beautiful ruins").

Given the associations between desire and sin, it's no surprise to come across 'Catholic Girls Are Easy', a confessional that starts out with steady acoustic strum and piano notes as she sings about losing her virginity and the anticlimax of it all ("In the back of a van/With my head against the door/It's not what I imagined/But it's what I came here for") as it moves from that disillusion to a loss of faith ("On my knees at your altar/Your hands up in my hair/I've learned how to love/And I've learned not to care/I've spent a lifetime praying/To folks who were not there") and a submission ("Catholic girls are easy/Easy to amuse/Easy to confuse/Catholic girls are easy/Easy to possess/Easy to caress…In the garden where all love ends/You can press against my thorns/I've nothing much to offer/But all I have is yours") as it swells with piano, horns and strings.

Oboe adding to the string quartet, despite lines like "The bell rings/And the bell sings of the faith you lost/And all of you are/And all you're not", imbued with an emotional uplift, 'Impossible Air', haunted by the musical ghost of The Carpenters and, while Sandy Denny's usually a reference point, conjuring thoughts of Eddi Reader, is arguably the loveliest song on the album and there's something profoundly moving as she sings "Your madness makes you beautiful/You said/Biting your lip for emphasis/And walking toward the concrete stairs/You almost turn/But you don't dare/Impossible you/Impossible me/Impossible air/In between".

Her mental health issues are also the bedrock of 'How To Be Small' which, with plangent piano backing, pins the feeling of depression in the simple opening line "I am so terribly lonely / How are things with you?" as she juxtaposes images of emotional and economic covid lockdown ("I hear you in the hum/Of the cars down Enmore Road/Down where all the late night bars/They have been forced to close/And I guess I am closing too/My heart is in repose"). Though she and Robyn Hitchcock are still very much a couple, the song captures a relationship falling apart ("There's a dying jacaranda/Underneath her I once sat/And beneath those purple flowers/You whispered that you love me back/That was another life ago") as she touchingly asks "Let me down easy/Let me down sweetly/Teach me not to mind the fall/Show me everything and nothing at all/Pin me to a crumbling wall/Teach me how to be small".

The penultimate slow, brushed and softly sung 'For You And Oblivion' (which may or may not be a nod to Hitchcock's 'You & Oblivion') travels between Inverness and Houston as she recounts an imagined conversion with the ghost of the late author Christopher Hitchens who "talks and he wheezes/He enjoys his own jokes/He says everything kills you/Then he lights up a smoke/He says this one's for you/This one's for you, honey/This one's for you and oblivion"). She whimsically references her own mental health issues ("I'm on the cusp of a crisis/But that's nothing new squire") and you can hear a smile in the voice as she sings "I'm waking up slowly/In Christopher's bed/But he doesn't exist/He's a voice in my head/Says perhaps I should try/Meditation instead".

Throughout the album love has been a means of support and healing, and, curiously evoking Coldplay, she ends with the steady walking rhythm, strings and sax colours of the soaring 'Signing Off With Love'. Referencing the poets Robert Lowell and Maggie Nelson, both of whom wrote seems like a song about lack of self-worth ("This bathroom mirror hates me/Even more than you do now/The creases on my brow/The crooked little mouth/The eyes that change their colour/The kaleidoscope of doubt… I've used up all my happiness/I've used up all yours too"). But while there's a despair in the final lines "Meet me at the station/Where the roses are in bloom/I'll be dressed in a dead woman's dress/And an actresses's perfume/With everything I own packed in a little case with wheels/Is this how the end of the world is supposed to feel?", ultimately, it's a recognition that the greatest grief comes from the greatest love and, while "the world's a spinning time bomb", perhaps the one is worth the other. Of the album and the journey that led to it she says, she says "Everyone experiences grief, pain, tremendous suffering, at one time or another. I wouldn't want to live through that particular season again, but I feel duty-bound to honor it". And she does so magnificently.

Mike Davies

Previous	Next
Laura-Mary Carter: Bye Bye Jackie	The Gentle Good: Between The Covers

Recent Reviews

Nothing And Forever

Fatea Showcase Sessions

The Fatea Showcase Sessions are a series of downloads featuring acts that we've really enjoyed and think that more people should get the chance to hear.

Pirate is the current session and features 16 fantastic artists check out the website to find out more about them and download your copy

www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk for all the artist information.

Visit The FATEA Archive!